So I’m spending a couple hours on this, my first day off in freaking ages, to search for a Primary Care Physician now that I have succesfully joined Anthem, a health insurance plan. So I go to their website where a “Physician Finder” appears to have a way to search for “Physicians”, which it defines as “All doctors consisting of Primary Care Providers, Generalists, and Medical Specialists including Ophthalmologists and Osteopaths.”

Yet when I run the search, no “Primary Care Providers” are listed, instead I get the names of 200+ physicians who have specialties in stuff. I am not looking for specialties, I am looking for the basic entry level physician! At this point I am wondering if one of the specialties might be a code name for “Primary Care”. Maybe the specialty of “Family Practice” is the same thing as “Primary Care”. Or maybe the specialty of “Internal Medicine” is the same thing as “Primary Care”. But “Family Practice” might also be code for “baby care”, since “families” produce babies.

This process is bullshit. At home, you join a Health Plan and they happen to have medical buildings associated with the Health Plan, and you get assigned a Primary Care physician, and that’s it. Here, what the hell? Here, you can join a health plan and then have no actual doctor? This is bullshit.

Ok, I’ve settled down and I think that “Family Practice” might indeed be “Primary Care”. To which I’d humbly suggest that they fucking rename it “Primary Care.”

(This entry is part of series of “things that are more difficult than they should be”)